In an era of perennial literary festivals, bookshop signings and reading tours, it is pertinent to reflect that our favourite image of the writer's life is still one of tortured solitude. They are expected to be lonely, wispy figures, largely removed from human congress, perhaps occasionally gathering in haunted-looking bands in the hired function room of some seaside hotel, where - under the watchful eye of the Society of Authors' general secretary - they exchange plaintive reports from the breadline.

I found myself doing just that last summer, and although some looked disappointingly well-nourished, there was a lot of convivial note-swapping about how we all got through our respective solitary days. Nobody, though, felt that isolation was a vitally necessary context of the writer's life, and I suspect we would all jump at the chance of a speaking tour of the United States, were our publicists ever to ring with the happy tidings.

Extreme reclusiveness still comes naturally to a few. Its guiding star is Thomas Pynchon, whose whereabouts, political proclivities, literary productivity and even physical appearance remain the subject of a whole industry of febrile speculation. Since there is no publicly available photograph taken since the 1950s, even his appearance carries an aura of enigma. Pynchon himself has said (or is perhaps only rumoured to have said) that "reclusiveness" generally means nothing more than "disinclination to talk to journalists", but if one were to set out on this road, his would be the model to follow.

Pynchon's wish to left alone is only slightly handicapped by his continuing to write large novels. For JD Salinger, the retreat into obscurity has been underpinned by not having published anything for more than 40 years, a pattern not likely to be broken now the (erstwhile) author is in his late eighties.

The daddy of all solitudinarians in the modern era was of course Samuel Beckett, who emerged only occasionally from his Garbo-like seclusion in Paris to direct one of his own plays. The attention this brought was clearly a torment: During rehearsals for Godot at London's Riverside Studios in 1984, he suffered a limited number of academics to hover around him for prescribed periods, as was noted by Tom Phillips, who produced a set of celebrated sketches of him: 'He endured their parasitism with the dignity of a beast on the plain on whom cattle egrets perch and feed." The rest was prolonged silence.

It clearly depends on what kind of writing we hope to do. To the Nietzsche of the later years, clambering breathlessly along Alpine passes, human contact was a tawdry obstacle that could only hinder the onward march of the Übermensch. The problem with being around other people, he remarks, is that you have to keep reacting to them, as even the Übermensch himself was reminded when, about to embark on one of his treks around Sils-Maria, he opened his parasol and was rattled on the head by stones that the village urchins had filled it with.